Chase Me Down, Link Me Up

It's not everyday that an ostensibly right-leaning columnist (albeit for the ostensibly left-leaning New York Times...) waxes eloquent about a populist, progressive rock star, but here's David Brooks doing just that:

I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.

Last week, my kids attended their first Springsteen concert in Baltimore. At one point, I looked over at my 15-year-old daughter. She had her hands clapped to her cheeks and a look of slack-jawed, joyous astonishment on her face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing — 10,000 people in a state of utter abandon, with Springsteen surrendering himself to them in the center of the arena.

Glenn, George & Sarah

Please take a look at some of Mike Putnams's photography from the Bend, Oregon area. I was fortunate to run into Mike beside the lake in downtown Bend the day after admiring his work at a nearby store, and he snapped a photo of Ann and I beside the lake with my iPhone which can be found somewhere on my Facebook page.

Alpenglow From Tumalo Mountain I carefully tracked weather patterns for weeks in hopes of capturing this image. A 3:30 AM alarm awoke me the morning after a 28 inch snowfall. The fresh powder created a wintery alpine view and an arduous snowshoe climb to the summit of Tumalo Mountain where this image was composed. Tumalo Mountain is a favorite playground for backcountry skiers because of its steep east facing bowl, proximity to the city of Bend and its wondrous alpine views. This specific view displays South Sister, Middle Sister and Broken Top bathed in the pink alpenglow of a winter sunrise.

I've been taken to task on occasion for speculating that the cloud-storage and streaming content paradigm (aka "The Celestial Jukebox) reduces "the remunerative value of recorded to music" to something "approaching zero."

Now comes the news from Sweden - home of the much-hyped, but still not available in the US streaming music service called Spotify - that Lady Gaga was paid a whopping $167 for more than one million plays of her tune "Poker Face:"

Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” was one of the most popular tracks for 5 months on Spotify; being played more than 1 million times. But according to reports this weekend, the Swedish Performing Rights Society only paid her $167. If true, it confirms other complaints from other artists like those of Swedish musican Magnus Uggla who pulled his music off Spotify declaring, "I'd prefer to be raped by Pirate Bay than played on Spotify".

I just ran the numbers through the calculator on my iPhone (turn it sideways and it can handle those kinds of numbers) and determined that $167 divided by 1-million = $0.000167. I think that equates to 1.67 10,000ths of a dollar, or 1.67 hundredths of cent per play.

After Hypebot released this initial "$167" story, Spotify came back with a rebuttal asserting that they paid Lady Gaga "more than that," but refusing to specify what exactly they did pay. The follow up story is worth reading because it does illustrate the complexity of these issues. But Spotify is going to have to demonstrate that what they paid Lady Gaga amounts to something like 1,000 times the reported figure before the return from a stream approximates anything like the expected return from a 99c download.

And therein lies the problem that faces everybody in the industry as the model shifts from downloads to streaming.

Admittedly, even 1.67-hundredths-of-a-cent is not quite zero, but it sure is close.

Anyway you slice it, it's hard to fathom how teensy numbers like that support a viable industry for recorded music.

We forged our way thru a ferocious blizzard (OK, it snowed a little) in order to reach the summit (all of 480 feet) of this dormant cinder cone on the outskirts of Bend, Oregon. We're here for a few days before returning to Portland for Thanksgiving with "The Boys."

The Boss had us on our feet for more than three hours last night -- and this time we were in a section with SEATS. Lotta good that did us. You couldn't tell what he was singing if you didn't already know all the songs (which, it seems, most people did), but that hardly mattered...

Early in the show, he went into the crowd...

and the crowd returned him to the stage...

Where the man bellowed out one tune after another at a full throated roar:

I don't know how he can do this night after night for three hours every night without tearing his vocal chords to shreds:

But do it he does...

And a highlight of the evening, the seminal album Born to Run played in its entirety, with, of course, everybody in the house singing along:

All of these photos were shot with a Canon G10 in manual mode from Section 105, Row D. Not too shabby for a "point and shoot" camera...<g>

West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd became the longest-serving lawmaker in congressional history today. The Senate paid tribute, and there was some sort of special resolution, but we thought we'd honor the 91-year-old public servant ourselves by pointing out just how old he is.

And while we're at it, one commenter observes that "Robert Byrd is now the longest serving legislator and longest serving ex-klansmen in Congress." But he does carry a copy of the Constitution in his coat pocket. How many other ex-klansman can you say that about?

We had to take a detour on the way home from Balsam Mountain NC last month after a rock slide closed I-40. So we the scenic route - US 129 -- aka "The Tail of the Drgaon" through Deal's Gap, a road much favored by motorcyclists (who were probably less than thrilled to be following our Subaru SUV) .